Tuesday, September 15, 2009

SET!

My in-laws have been visiting us for the past week. Last night we said our goodbyes and they are now on the train to their home in Florida. It was a long week--full of adventures on occasion, but also a restructuring of our days because of their physical and emotional limitations. Keeping up with an active ten-year-old boy can exhaust anybody!

Days of rain also kept us indoors more than we would like--but a stash of favorite games kept us entertained. Fundamentally, I am not much of a game person. I don't like games based primarily on luck, and I don't like those that stress competition or the importance of winning. When the two combined, I am likely to whine quite a bit.

One game I really love, though, is SET. The object of the game is to identify sets of three cards. Each card has four features: color (red, green or blue/purple), symbol (diamond, squiggle or oval), shading (solid, striped or open), and number (1, 2 or 3). A "set" consists of three cards on which each feature is either the same on all of the cards, or different on all of the cards. For example, you could have a set with 3 cards where all are red, all are squiggles, there is one of each type of shading, and there is one of each number.

What games do you play with your family? We'd love to be introduced to some new ones!

2 comments:

My sister is so good at Set that our family can't even play that game anymore! The same company makes a few other great games- our favorite is Quiddler. It's like a simplified Scrabble in card form- and it's great fun. My parents also are huge fans of a dice game called Farkle. All you need is to look up the instructions online- you don't need to buy anything (assuming you have six regular dice rolling around your home!)

Have you played any Eurogames, such as Settlers of Catan or Ticket to Ride? Certain card games would fall in that category, as well- Guillotine and Bang are some of my favorites. All of them are great fun, and a very good mental workout.

Ooh--we've certainly got similar game tastes. We play Quiddler, Settlers of Catan (where I always have a surfeit of sheep, appropriately enough), and other euro-type games like Carcassonne (which is one of my favorites). But we don't know Ticket to Ride, Farkle, or the card games! Thanks very much.